TOK Diving Bell Essay

Knowing as an individual can be distinguished from community
knowledge because it comes from yourSELF and it includes knowledge by
instinct, conviction, etc. Community knowledge consists more of
general theories or perceptions like racism or that racism is wrong,
or what is going on in areas like politics, etc. Bauby attains
individual knowledge through experiences in the hospital and then
retains that with memory. He also gains some knowledge by community,
like in his chapter "Tourists" in which he explains the psychological
groupings in the hospital (the obese patients, the paralytics...) and
how they "interact" with each other (most of the time avoiding
interaction, like when the patients in the gym "stare at the fire
detector" rather than making awkward eye contact with poor paralyzed
Bauby. Sometimes it is difficult to differentiate between our
individual vs. community knowledge because our individual beliefs can
be heavily influenced by community knowledge and beliefs, or we can
subconsciously assume that because WE think something, everyone else
does too (for example, maybe it IS just Bauby who pictures the
hospital split up like that into groups).
Knowing as an individual and knowing as a community are both
valuable ways of gaining knowledge, each with its limitations. Knowing
as an individual has value because it is the only way to gain personal
knowledge, such as knowledge by introspection. A community, as a
whole, cannot feel empathy or sympathy for a specific person or gain
instinctive knowledge such as how to breathe; those are things that
can only be known on a personal level. Personal knowledge of the
individual has the ability to be intrinsic and detailed, and a person
can be very sure in their personal knowledge and feel more certain
about what they know then something they have learned as part of a
community. However, perhaps this is not such a good thing and is more
of a limitation, because if the knower is satisfied and the knowledge
is just thought to be certain, who will challenge it to see if it is
really true and to make it more accurate? This same problem arises,
perhaps more, with knowledge of a community: community knowledge is
rarely challenged since either pretty much everyone belives it so
there is noone to disagree, or the person who thinks otherwise does
not have the courage to confront the whole community. Another weakness
of individual knowledge is that it is only ONE person's perspective
when multiple perspectives may need to be considered, and, as we know,
one person can perceive and interpret things very incorrectly or
heavily (perhaps too heavily) influenced by past experiences and
pre-associations, etc.
Community knowledge is a bunch of people's perspectives together,
which, hopefully, would create a more accurate picture, since claims
could be supported by multiple witnesses and considered by more than
one perspective, etc. However, this strength only goes so far because
it is still only ONE community who could be stuck in THEIR paradigms,
so ultimately, there will always be an element of inaccuracy from lack
of varied perspectives. Community knowledge is more easily shared with
other people/communities since it usually consists more of large ideas
than specific detailed knowledge or feelings of an individual, which,
with the limits of language and sounds, letters, or even words trying
to represent complex emotions and events, can be very difficult to put
into words understandable by another person. Bauby's complicated and
painfully slow method of transcribing words from the blinking of his
one eye is a good example of the language and translation barriers an
individual can face when trying to communicate knowledge. Not only was
he unable to describe things in full length because of the extremely
long time it took to "say" things, but Bauby's words were then
translated from French into English to be in the book, and some
meaning could have ben lost here (in cultural expressions which don't
provide a literal translation, etc.). A strength/limit (depending on
which standpoint you look at it from - the believing community's or
the influenced individual's) of community knowledge is that a big
group of people believing something can have influence on individuals,
such as the Nazis who influenced many many people to think that Jews
were inferior... Community rules, expectations, social groups, ideas
of "polite" behavior and language, etc. also limit the individual in
what they can do and believe ("know") if they really wanted to be
accepted by society, which I think is a natural desire in all of us,
although maybe subconsciously for some.
While I don't think that either knowledge by community or
knowledge as an individual is particularly stronger than the other
(each is better for separate things), I do think that most of the
knowledge we use on a daily basis to get through life is more personal
knowledge, attained solely by US, so individual knowledge could maybe
be considered more useful in day-to-day life than community knowledge
(things more like politics and celebrities than how to make yourself
food to eat).
How much of this knowledge, whether individually gained or
gained by community, depends on interactions with others? It is too
hard for me to put a number or percentage to this, but I would say a
fair amount is gained via interacting with other people. If you lived
on a desert island, all by yourself, how much would you know? Not very
much. Our perception of our world, geography, the existence of people
other than us and the ones directly around us, and so much more, is
all attained by talking with other people, sharing ideas and "putting
our heads together." Knowledge about ourselves is also gained in part
by interacting with others, for example, we can learn about our
patience level, our preferences, things that make us happy or sad or
excited, all from acting and reacting with and to other humans. But we
can also learn quite a lot on our own or by simply observing other
people. If a prep refuses to interact with a group of "nerds", she can
still notice what they wear or eat or talk about. However, observance
without interaction can produce warped views of people; maybe the prep
will think the nerds like being isolated when in reality they're
dieing to belong to a group. Perhaps when Bauby thinks the nurse is
being rough with him because she doesn't care, she is really just
ignorant of how her handholds really feel to him. This is one of the
many problems with knowledge... It can be WRONG!
Whether there is any way to gain knowledge by description and
knowledge by acquaintance without depending on interaction with
others, I suppose, depends on your definition of "interaction".
Knowledge by description, claiming you know something because you can
describe its existence or its properties or whatever, requires the
ability to use language, which I think depends not so much upon
interactions with other people, but upon a person's interactions with
language and their ability to handle it, combined with the properties
of the knowledge being described; if it is the knowledge of how an
emotion feels, it is very difficult to describe in words. Of course,
it helps if there is a another person to describe the knowledge TO,
and perhaps interacting with another person helps the describer come
up with words of description or to realize that the knowledge is not
quite how they thought it was... Knowledge by acquaintance usually
cannot be gained without interaction with others because you can't
really "know someone's nature through experience" if you HAVE no
experience with them, seeing how they react to things you say and
getting used to how they interact with you. However, you can still
gain acquaintance with someone's habits, moods, etc. by simply
watching them. If I watch my mom go through her daily routine singing
and dancing but don't actually say anything or make eye contact with
her, I can still know (as far as one CAN know the true emotions or
someone else) that she is feeling happy. Bauby sometimes interacted
with his nurses, blinking out a message to them and asking them to
close the window, or cooperating (or not) with his speech therapists
and such, but he also just sat and watched them a lot, and this is
mostly how he became "acquainted" with them - observation. In Bauby's
chapter, "At the Wax Museum", he says of his nurses, "I got to know
them better. They carried out as best they could their delicate
mission"(110) and "They readily lapse into their local patois as soon
as they are alone together."(111) Bauby did not gain all this
knowledge by sitting down and having a heart-to-heart chat with each
of the personnel or even by sharing very endearing looks with them -
after all, even his face is paralyzed, and I highly doubt each nurse
gazes thoughtfully into his eyes to decipher his look and then
responds to him...
So I think that neither knowledge by description nor knowledge
by acquaintance really DEPEND on interaction, but it certainly does
aid the gaining of the two.
Once we have gained this "knowledge" through the many ways we attain
information, we have to justify it to ourselves (we would not just
believe that a pink unicorn flew over our heads - what is there to
prove it?), so how do we do that? I think the most powerful way we
justify our knowledge claims is our own empirical sense perception. If
I saw something, "I KNOW I saw it! It was THERE! How could it not be
there if I SAW it and HEARD the noise it made?!" I think humans tend
to forget that our senses and sense perception can be faulty,
especially when pride or belief is a part of the picture; that is one
of the problems of knowledge: our attainment of what we claim to be
"knowledge" can be influnced by various factors and turn out a little
twisted, and we fail to see that. Anyway, in general, I think we
naturally tend to trust ourselves more than others and are more likely
to think THEY made a mistake, because "I KNOW what I saw"... Which is
why I think that our empirical sense perception is more powerful in
our justification of knowledge than, say, "authoritative or divine
revelation". However, if a person is highly religious or has been
trained to, wholeheartedly, in all situations, trust their father or
priest or doctor or whatever, I guess they might believe in knowledge
gained via that authority more so than what they thought they knew
themselves. For example, if a priest claimed to REALLY turn a glass
of wine into the blood of Jesus, and some devout follower drank it,
even though their tongue might have tasted only wine, they could claim
to KNOW it was really blood because their mind was so convinced it
was, that they believed what they were told more than what they
actually personally tasted.
Bauby was only told by his doctors and nurses that the reason he had
a stroke and was paralyzed was because he had locked-in syndrome, so
HE might say that in this case, authoritative revelation is more
powerful than more personal knowledge (such as empirical sense
perception); how could HE know he had locked-in syndrome? However,
BAUBY was the only one who could fully know how it feels to be
paralyzed and have the syndrome. He is the one feeling the drool all
over his cheek and the inability to move his muscles, not the doctors.
So in my mind, Bauby's empirical sense perception has more value and
power than something he knows because the doctor told him.
One might also argue that memory is the most powerful justification
of knowledge because, look at people with Alzheimers - can they really
KNOW much of anything? Almost all of Bauby's knowledge of his past
comes from his memory, so where would he be without that? However, he
did just come out of a coma, so how reliable is his memory for
justifying his knowledge of the past? (In his book The Diving Bell and
the Butterfly, Bauby describes his "Dream" (pages 49-52) or
recollection of events mixed with dreaming that took place while he
was in a coma. It is difficult to decipher which parts of this memory
really occurred and which were created by his imagination.) It could
also be argued that sense perception is not much good if you can't
REMEMBER it 2 minutes later, but I say there isn't too much to
remember if you don't first perceive it with your senses. If you
couldn't see, hear, feel, taste, and smell, and then interpret those
pieces of information (although you COULD interpret them incorrectly),
it would be really hard to tell what was going on.